Unanswered Help with Cura Settings

So I recently bought a Robo 3d R1 plus and really love it. I printed a couple calibration models using matter control and then tried to jump to Cura (15.04.4) as it seems most people have more flexibility and it is a overall better slicer.

Initially when I started using cura i had the advanced settings on and the calibration box wasnt coming out great. After printing multiple boxes changing one thing at a time i was getting decent prints but not quite as clean as the medium present in matter control.

However, now when I try and print with cura the first layer tries to print but there is no space between the bed and the hotend so the pla starts to ball up around the hotend. It runs the auto level command fine but it doesnt seems to create a small gap between the hot end and the bed. I have tried just using the basic presents in cura but the same thing keeps happening.


I was hoping someone might be able to help me fix this and or give me some base settings to work off of with cura as I would like to move past the presets in mattercontrol to get my printer more dialed in. Please keep in mind ive only had this printer for a week so i wont be as savy as you guys. Im sure its just a setting that I dont know about (newbie) thats causing it.

Also when i set up cura I was able to select the robo 3d profile but it has the nozzle size as .46mm and matter control has .4mm. I have tried printing the calibration box with both of these settings in cura and the issue remains.


Any help getting cura running better would be greatly appreciated.

 

You need a Z offset in your startup G-code

Code:

M565 Z-1.0 ;more negative is further from the bed

give this a look over: http://community.robo3d.com/index.php?threads/how-to-cura-15-04-setup.4169/ but you'll notice the latest versions of 15.04 have the robo3d profile already, just not the startup g-code

 

Thank you for your reply, Heres a Screenshot from of the gcode that was already in place. Is this correct? If so should I try M565 Z-2.00

 

I'm not entirely sure if it's critical but I find it works best to have it right before G29 and try using a .0 on that

 

Thank you I tried that and it seemed to kind of work. (Started printing first layer) But then it started to catch on itself and ball up again. Could this be because filament is getting stuck to the hotend and begins to cacth on itself? I.E a small amount of filament is coming out when auto leveling. Maybe its getting stuck to the hotend ?

Or should I try and adjusting the z offset by .01 mm and try again ?

 

When I did mine, I sat there running first layer after first layer and cleaning the bed each and every time until I finally had it fine tuned. IIRC, I started with -1 then went to -0.5 and a bunch more and in the end came up with -0.8 as my setting using 20mm first layer speed and it has been working well for me.

 

PLA is a pain to get to adhere to the glass. Increasing your first layer height and width helps to get a fat layer of filament down.

But yeah, just keep adjusting the offset till you get close. 0.1-0.2mm at a time is a good amount .01 (10 microns) is too little to really tell the difference. 50 microns is as much as you'd conceivably need

 

Afat08 - I haven't thought of lowering the hotend to the bed I was thinking that was the problem. However I guess that in conjunction with a slower speed could help it stick. I did about 5 first layers and got -1.15 to work, however the line it makes around the actual print gets a little messed up. ( See attachment)

Mike - I think I was in a hurry and meant to type .1. Either way, I got it to work but Im going to try and lowering it as well to see what those results are.

I have my initial layer height to .3 and just changed my first layer speed to 20 mm/s. To adjust the first layer width would I increase the "initial layer line width" to a value above %100 which it is at now ?

Sorry if these questions are redundant, Also thanks for helping me out.

 

That pictures a bit hard to make out details on but it seems like you have some resonance issues. Make sure all your belts are a good tension and that the set screws on the X and Y pulley are good and tight